Takoyaki Signs

My favorite vendor food sign here is by far the takoyaki. (Octopus balls) They always look so happy, beckoning customers to their booths!

Zombie Attack!

Lets face it, zombies are serious threat we face in our modern world. I commend Japan for taking the lead in educating children on how to respond to the undead threat. (Despite the decaying appearance, you can tell the zombie is Japanese - it removes it's shoes when it chases the family into the house)

Seki - City of Swords

Last weekend I was lucky enough to attend a sword forging demonstration in Seki, a city renowned for their cutlery going back to Japan's feudal era. The museum in Seki only does something like five demonstrations a year, so that one of them happened to be while I was here and had an available weekend seems like very good fortune. I'll admit that I'm a huge nerd when it comes to this kind of stuff; I'm not terribly keen on martial arts exactly, I just have an interest in arms and armor.

I went into the demonstration with a solid background in Japanese swords, but knowing how one of the things is put together says nothing about the basic construction. It's like saying you know how a car is made because you've seen the assembly line, even though you're unclear on how the individual parts were produced. I'd previously pictured the swords being produced by one person, when in reality it was a small team. 'Labor intensive' doesn't begin to describe the process. As part of the iron refining (the demonstration we were watching) the metal is folded over and over... in the roughly hour and a half we observed the team of four folded the iron twice, and swords can have more than ten folds. That's a lot of work before the thing starts looking even remotely sword shaped!

Run for your life!

On Saturday, A and I visited Nara, a city in the mountains east of Osaka. It's religiously very important, being home to several notable shrines and temples, but is also home to a large population of sika deer. These aren't the sort of viewed at a distance deer you might be used to; although their 'sacred' status was revoked after WWII, they are protected as national treasures and are absurdly tame. They're content to go about their business, pose for photos, and generally be pleasant, until they spot someone buy a bag of 'deer cookies'.

Small stalls in the park sell stacks of round, baked wafers specifically for feeding the deer. If you've seen someone attempting to feed pidgins in a city and getting completely swarmed, you know where this is going... just imagine getting swarmed by persistent deer! If you run away, they'll only chase you, and do you really think you can run faster than the fleet-footed deer?

I didn't see any smaller children have problems - they were always quick to hand over the cookies when approached by the deer. For some reason, it was usually the older people who rather than handing over the food, thought they'd somehow manage to take a step back and regain control of the situation. As if the deer would allow that to happen! It's full court press from the moment they spot you with food until they're fully convinced you no longer have any.

While dodging the random deer droppings throughout the city can be a little trying, the deer add to the uniqueness of Nara and contributed significantly to my enjoyment of the place.

Cherry Blossom Holiday

While there isn't technically a holiday associated with the cherry blossoms, people here seem to have taken it upon themselves to act like there is. On Friday, the whole American crew (M, L, A, and I) headed over to Tsurmai Park, which we were told was the place to have an evening picnic under the cherry blossoms. We came prepared with adult beverages and tasty snacks, but nothing could prepare us for the view we found when we exited the subway...

The park itself was striking - a large grove of sprawling cherry trees was lit with hanging lanterns. The number of visitors in the park was the real shock - nearly every inch of space under and around the cherry trees was covered with a blanket and picnicking party people. We were expecting a crowd (it was a local university's 'welcome week') but I was a little overwhelmed with the number of people.

We staked out a decent people-watching spot on the edge of a small pond in the park, and proceeded to get our snack and drink on. After finishing sandwiches and our first round, we were snapping photos when a pair of passing guys offered to take a photo including our full group. Happy to accept, we handed over cameras and got some nice pics.

Then our evening took a turn. One of the guys (in the middle) was very insistent that we should join their group closer to the cherry trees, and lacking a good reason not to we packed up and followed them back into the thick of the partying.

It turned out we'd actually walked right by their group earlier, and I'd been impressed by the folding kneeling-height tables they'd brought along. When we were seated at the table (sitting there in our socks, shoes left at the edge of the blanket), I was impressed again by their eagerness to share drinks and food with complete strangers. While I suspect we were the butt of a few jokes, I can't say I really minded. I never would have tried grilled intestine on a stick or tiny whole bbq squid (yes, they were eating it all too - it wasn't just 'feed the foreigner funny food') on my own, and the return to treats I'd tried earlier in the trip like takoyaki (octopus balls) was a nice bonus.

Notice they're all in suits? They'd come straight from work, where they were engineers and architects for an apartment building construction company. This photo was taken around 10pm, so these guys have been at it for a while. What an evening! If you're ever in Japan, I recommend you get picked up by strangers at least once.

Bathroom etiquette

It seems like every time I use a bathroom in one of the subways, just as I get down to business an older woman comes in and starts puttering around cleaning. I might have been more concerned had the bathroom not been quite crowded the first time it happened - the other bathroom patrons went about their business like she wasn't there. It's decidedly stranger when you're alone, and someone of the opposite gender comes in to start mopping the floors. At home there'd be jail time, here there's an apology for the wet floor.

Another good example of lacking bathroom modesty is the arrangement shown in this photo: no bathroom door. This facility was at a botanical garden in Tokyo, and while the bathroom was sort of out of the way, it still seems hard to justify this arrangement. I never anticipated my American sense of bathroom privacy would have me so out of place here!

Helium for sale

I noticed this odd booth at the Okkawa Float Festival a few weeks ago. These aren't really balloons, although they're filled with helium... they're explicitly for inhaling to make you sound funny. I'm told the booth's banner mentions something about 'duck voice', which is actually quite a good description when you think about it. Hooray for random festival merchandise!